associated press
NEW LIFE: The refinery was sold to developers who are working to turn it into a residential and retail complex.

Photo: DAVID J. PHILLIP

associated press
NEW LIFE: The refinery was sold to developers...

Image 2 of 8

ADVANCE FOR WEEKEND MARCH 31- APRIL 1-- Sugar is stored in silos at Imperial Sugar, which gave the Houston suburb Sugar Land its' name, Tuesday, March 20, 2001 in Sugar Land, Texas. Imperial Sugar, founded in 1843, was a privately owned raw sugar mill and then a sugar refinery until 1988 when it bought publicly held Holly Sugar Corp., a Colorado Springs, Colo.-based sugar beet processor. The acquisition doubled Imperial's size. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Photo: DAVID J. PHILLIP

ADVANCE FOR WEEKEND MARCH 31- APRIL 1-- Sugar is stored in silos at...

Image 3 of 8

The Imperial Sugar Co. in Sugar Land sits empty since its closing in 2003. Land development is planned for this historic site. The char house, in the background, will be salvaged and remain on site.

Photo: Frank Casimiro

The Imperial Sugar Co. in Sugar Land sits empty since its closing...

Image 4 of 8

Nick de la Torre : STAFF
DOWN WITH THE OLD: The refinery's furnace house was demolished in December 2010 to make way for mixed-use buildings.

Photo: Nick De La Torre

Nick de la Torre : STAFF
DOWN WITH THE OLD: The refinery's furnace...

Image 5 of 8

Imperial Sugar has been headquartered in Sugar Land since its inception over 100 years ago.

Photo: handout

Imperial Sugar has been headquartered in Sugar Land since its...

Image 6 of 8

Imperial Sugar Co., Texas, 1880, A massive, impressive refinery now stands on the spot where in 1840, two brothers, Nathaniel and Matthew Williams, planted their first crop of sugar cane. Sam houston was in his second term as president of the Republic of Texas. By 1843 the brothers were processing their cane with a mule-powered mill and open-air cooking kettles. The mill which they built that year gives the Imperial Sugar Company its claim to be the oldest business in Texas. This shot of the refinery was taken in the 1880s when the now bustling town of Sugar Land consisted of a rooming house, a general store and little else. Photo used Chronicle Magazine, Sun. May 18, 1986. HOUCHRON CAPTION (12/04/2002): In the 1880s there was no city of Sugar Land -- just the refinery, a rooming house and general store.

Melissa Phillip : STAFF LIVELY: City Hall at Sugar Land Town Square is one of the first suburban town center projects in the Houston area. Unlike some of the others, though, there is real history there.

Photo: Melissa Phillip

Melissa Phillip : STAFF LIVELY: City Hall at Sugar Land Town Square...

When I think of Sugar Land, I think of a suburb where everything seems so new that it hasn't had time to get dirty. I think of master-planned subdivisions, of golf courses and shopping, of easy affluence and meticulous lawn care.

Sugar Land's website proudly describes its City Hall building as "timeless architecture," "traditional and federal." It opened in 2004.

That City Hall is the proud centerpiece of Sugar Land Town Square, a cheerful, stylishly walkable "lifestyle development" with a "historical theme." It includes upscale apartments, and a mall-like collection of upscale stores and restaurants: the usual chains (Ann Taylor, P.F. Chang's, Jamba Juice) along with a few smaller operators (Strasburg Children, A Dog's Life! Luxury Dog Boutique).

In front of City Hall, there's a fountain with a bronze statue of Stephen F. Austin astride a rearing horse, pulling another thrashing horse through the water behind him, at some unspecified moment in Texas history. It's a tableau so perfectly dramatic and perfectly vague that, amid all these clean frictionless mall stores and restaurants, it seems fake, made up to suit the décor.

That's how I usually think of Sugar Land: as a place like white sugar, pure pleasure but somehow empty. The messiness of real life, and real history, has been refined away.

Dinos and Lead Belly

Recently, though, I've been changing my mind. The first reason was, of all things, the Sugar Land outpost of the Houston Museum of Natural Science, which opened a couple of years ago. It houses its triceratops and T. rex skeletons in the red-brick building that used to be the Main Unit of the Central State Prison Farm - part of the prison system whose convicts, mostly African-American, replaced slaves in Sugar Land's backbreaking sugarcane and cotton fields.

It was in that prison (though not in that brick building) that Lead Belly famously sang the blues, including The Midnight Special: "If you're ever in Houston/ Boy, you better walk right/ You better not tussle/ And you better not fight." Otherwise, you'd end up like he did, working on the Imperial Prison Farm, waiting each night for a train's headlight to flash through your cell window.

What exactly does an old prison building have to do with dinosaur skeletons? Nothing directly. But they both hint of complicated worlds that are long gone and of the harsher existences that came before us. They say: This piece of earth isn't new, and it has stories to tell.

Smokestacks

A far bigger project in the works is the Imperial, a 715-acre development that includes the site of the defunct Imperial Sugar refinery - the factory that built Sugar Land, the old industrial center of what was once a company town.

The walkable, bike-friendly development will include a baseball stadium for the minor-league Skeeters; housing (single-family, multifamily and assisted living); restaurants and bars; and an office park. It'll give spread-out Sugar Land something that feels like the tight-packed middle of town, the place where things happen - something that the area seems hungry for. Even without any residential development at all on the site, the brand-new Saturday farmers market already attracts around 5,000 shoppers from the surrounding neighborhoods.

In the last decade, high-density town-center developments like that have sprouted all over Houston's suburbs, creating some lively places: among them, Woodlands Town Center, Pearland Town Center and, of course, Sugar Land Town Square. The thing that makes Imperial different is that it isn't being created entirely from scratch on a bulldozed site. Unlike those other brand-new town centers, it'll have some history to it.

Johnson Development, spurred by a University of Houston class on historic architecture, intends to not only to preserve the refinery's most historic structures - the eight-story brick Char House, the water tower - but to revamp many of the others in the 45-acre historic part of the site, too, and to play up Imperial's history throughout the development. The 1920s Char House, where bones were charred to be used to filter sugar syrup, will become an office building with a rooftop restaurant. Old warehouses will house stores and clubs. The sugar silos - not old enough to be considered historic, but iconic - will remain where they are, serving as a kind of billboard. Similarly, a pair of rusty smokestacks, left from a demolished building, will stand alone, like brawny sculptures. And throughout the development, odds and ends from the old refinery, and the old crown symbol from Imperial Sugar's logo, will remind shoppers, residents and office workers where they are: on an old industrial site, at a place with a brawny real history.

At a white-sugar refinery, of all places, you'll be able to see and feel Texas history.